Retirement planning with clients is never simply about the numbers, advisors say. That’s equally the case when it comes to advising transgender people for retirement.
More than 9% of U.S. adults identified as LGBTQ+ in 2024, up 66% from 2020, according to the most recent Gallup poll. Transgender people make up about 14% of all LGBTQ+ Americans and 1.3% of all U.S. adults.
As more people openly identify as trans, financial advisors can help their practices and their clients by better understanding some of the unique considerations that come up when advising trans clients.
Financial advisors specializing in LGBTQ+ clients often find that retirement planning for transgender individuals isn’t fundamentally different from working with others. But staying attuned to a few essential considerations can make what might otherwise be an overwhelming process much smoother.
Consider the immediate needs
Advisors say that broaching the retirement conversation can be difficult for trans clients whose attention is on more immediate needs, like obtaining gender-affirming surgery or relocating to more accepting places.
“For clients who are pre-transition or in transition, I don’t think focusing on retirement makes sense,” said Lindsey Young, founder of Quiet Wealth in Baltimore, Maryland. “First of all, most trans people pre-transition, they’re constantly thinking about transition, and so they can’t think longer term because it’s constantly on their mind. And when they’re in transition, they’re thinking about transition a lot more. When people get through transition and they’re a lot happier and they feel a lot more stable, then they’re in a place where you can start thinking about long-term planning.”
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For Landon Tan, founder of Query Capital in Brooklyn, New York, potential relocation costs have become an increasingly common consideration for many of his trans clients.
“I think as the climate of transphobia increases, there are more people who are leaving their communities to go find a place where they’re going to be kind of legally allowed to exist,” Tan said. “I also have a lot of clients who are thinking about leaving the country because of the increasing transphobic climate federally as well.”
Making that move can be a costly but necessary decision for some clients, Tan said.
“The decision to move to another country is not really a financial decision, per se, because it’s so deeply personal,” Tan said. “It … really kind of defines your day-to-day experience of existing. So I definitely talk it over with clients, if they’re thinking about it, and then other clients who really know that that’s what they want to do, then I would kind of take their lead, and I would point them in the right direction.”
Game-plan for before, during and after transitioning
Financial planning for trans clients can look very different depending on whether they’ve already transitioned or not, advisors say.
Planning for pre-transition clients can involve a variety of financial considerations including and beyond gender-affirming surgeries, Young said. For married clients, transitioning can often result in divorce. And depending on the types of medical procedures a client would like to have, transitioning can involve job disruptions or even necessitate career changes, Young said.
“As a financial planner, what you’re trying to do is help a person come up with a game plan for … how to go through this transition, because this is typically a multiyear process,” Young said. “And so in that respect, I think that helping someone who is transgender go through that, it’s a very specific thing.”
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Because of the unique considerations that come with transitioning, Young said pre-transition clients are generally better served by LGBTQ-supportive advisors who have specific knowledge around the factors involved in transitioning.
But for clients who have already transitioned, Young said that advisors generally don’t encounter many trans-specific issues.
“For people who are through transition, there’s really no reason why any LGBTQ-supportive advisor can’t work with them. [For] most folks who are through … transition, there’s not really a lot of issues specific to trans folks,” Young said. “There are LGBTQ-specific issues quite frequently, even after transition. But there really isn’t any transgender-specific related thing besides, you know, having an understanding [of] the community and the challenges that the community is facing.”
Practice using the right pronouns
Even well-intentioned advisors can make mistakes when it comes to using a trans client’s chosen name and preferred pronouns.
For advisors who may not interact with many trans or nonbinary people in their daily life, learning to use the singular gender-neutral pronoun “they” can be like learning a second language, Tan said.
“I have these conversations all the time with people who are trying to be allies to trans people and really struggling to, you know, address people by their chosen name or use their gender pronouns, and they really want to, but they really struggle with it,” Tan said. “And I think those are actually skills that get practiced a lot when you are in the queer community, because you know a lot of your friends … use gender-neutral pronouns, and so you just get a ton of practice, so it’s very second nature.”
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“And I think that people who are allies can absolutely improve in that, and they can just set aside time to practice,” Tan added. “They don’t have a lot of people in their lives who are kind of forcing them to practice, but it is just going to be more of like learning a language, right?”
Along with an advisor improving their own skills, Tan said it’s important for a firm to build support for trans clients into their infrastructure. On a basic level, that means creating space for things like chosen names and pronouns on a client’s profile and displaying those details prominently to make sure the entire advisory team addresses the client in a respectful way.
Treat transgender clients as three-dimensional people
Well-intentioned allyship can also go too far if an advisor ends up attributing everything about a client to their identity as a transgender person, Tan said.
For example, an advisor who is overly focused on their client’s trans identity could listen to that client talk about a disagreement with a family member and automatically assume that the conflict has to do with them being trans, even if that’s totally irrelevant to the situation.
“Sometimes when people are allies they will sort of fixate on certain prominent aspects of being trans, or think that everything kind of goes back to their transness,” Tan said. “[It’s important] to remind yourself to view the person as a whole person. You don’t have to deny that they are trans. But … allyship is about showing up and treating someone as a person, and making sure that you’re creating an environment where they can feel at home.”
Help trans clients imagine a future retirement
Planning for retirement with trans clients is often more of an imagination issue than a financial one, advisors say.
For pre-transition clients, thinking about retirement can be especially difficult, Young said. But even for clients who have already transitioned, it can be difficult for them to see themselves growing old and needing retirement funds.
“I think with all of the anti-trans legislation, it’s easy to think … that we don’t have a future,” Tan said. “And so I think that that is really common, that people are not thinking about the future. And I think it’s also a legacy of the AIDS epidemic that it really knocked out an entire generation of elders. I mean, obviously not an entire generation, but there are a lot of voices missing. And I think that can be hard to see your future.”
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That’s especially true for younger trans people, Tan said. Many Generation Z investors broadly are struggling to plan for retirement, disillusioned with the idea that they’ll ever be able to quit working.
Tan said even his young, trans clients in high-paying jobs are often “shocked” when he tells them that they will be able to retire at 65 after completing a financial plan for them.
“It doesn’t take nearly as much as people imagine, just because they’re so used to thinking that it’s not possible, even though they’ve never really tried to calculate it before,” Tan said. “It’s just like a fruit dangling from a branch right in front of their face, and they just don’t believe that it might exist, and so they don’t think that they should reach for it. I really want people to dream of their futures and believe that aging as a queer, trans person is possible.”
